Three snippets

Writing again.

I’ve been reading a lot more recently. I’m trying to take advantage of my library and also trying to actually accomplish my yearly reading goal. With 6 months left to go I don’t think I’m going to make it, but I’m at least going to keep going for it.

Recently I’ve read Cities I’ve Never Lived in by Sara Majka which was incredibly good and a bit of Bugsy and other Stories by Rafael Frumkin, which I got what they were going for but wasn’t my cup of tea. Majka’s stories are brilliantly written observations about the outcast class amongst us. She writes about those on the outskirts of society: the poor, the abused, the hurt. I don’t think I could write about that (upper middle class upbringing here) but I think, with the right practice, I could write like that: open, honest, vulnerable and raw.

I’m two stories into The Nightmare Box and Other Stories by Cynthia Gómez which is good in a campy sort of way. I couldn’t sleep one morning (Cookie woke me up!) and so got through Manu Larcenet’s graphic novel adaptation of Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road, which was brilliantly illustrated and breathtakingly bleak. I finished Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner which reminded me that novels can be fun to read and write!

I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I want to write and why I want to write. I signed up for a 10 week online writing class because I know that I want to get better at writing but don’t know yet how to do it. Honestly, it makes me incredibly anxious to even think about taking a class. I haven’t done a writing class since college and back then I was so certain of everything I was writing. I wasn’t the best in the class but I had a strong voice and a sense of direction and, more than just understanding the value of writing, I didn’t care about the value of writing, only the way it made me feel.

Now I’ve been beaten down a bit by a string of rejections and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness to what I write. Through therapy I’ve sort of uncovered that writing has been this connective tissue throughout my entire life: a single thing that’s remained consistent about my identity. That’s to say, it feels safe when other things feel more threatening.

Truthfully I care too much about others’ perceptions of me. I want, desperately and shamefully, to be able to write a love story that’s good enough to convince others I’m good enough and that seeps through the writing, even if I don’t want it to. I suppose in a lot of ways I’ve been trying to write love stories that make my exes and current partners proud.

I suppose, I think way too much about men’s opinion of my writing.

No bad words for the coast today

I thought about how silly that sounded. Or perhaps, how gluttonous. To me that’s all one could want: one good thing created. It wasn’t so much the sharing, though I suppose that could be nice. It was the creation of it, or the finishing of it. The finality of a thing, once imagined, now concrete. To hell if someone sees it, I thought, it’s there, it’s alive.

At night we visited a 24 hour coffee shop and sat outside and read or drank. They decorated the ceiling with strings of dusty CDs and fairy lights. Where the dust didn’t linger, the light would catch and send faint rainbow auras dancing around the room. It was hot at night but less hot than the normal Texas summers. When we were finished we walked through the alleyway behind people’s houses, quiet and marveling at the long black sheet of night stretched out above us. He held my hand and we continued that way till we reached his car. I thought about that night often, and how this best reflected his love for me: quiet and unassuming but packed with assumed symbolic meaning.

In the morning we had sex and he made us bad coffee, burned from the old coffee maker that lived on his kitchen counter. I wanted something stronger and cooler. I could never stand the taste of hot coffees. I didn’t like to wait, I wanted to consume things fast and feel their full effects.

He left me in the winter, for the man he had been sleeping with instead of me. All of my friends at the time tried to keep this quiet. They were more his friends than mine so I understood. They tiptoed around the subject, hoping that by saying nothing they would spare my feelings. But I already knew he was with the other man. I had known it for a while, the way you know something to be true but refuse to believe it anyway. It felt sunken: like a pit was opened in my stomach and slowly was consuming all parts of me. I tried, at that time, to fill it up. I wanted the feeling gone so I stuffed a bunch of things inside it hoping that would satisfy its hunger, hoping it would not return. But it kept growing and eventually I had to accept the truth of what it was telling me, even if doing so consumed everything about our love I had previously known.

I kept trying to write our story. I wasn’t sure why. I thought that maybe by writing it out I could make it true. I thought if I understood the form of it, the structure, its function on my life then maybe I could understand his leaving. But there wasn’t anything to understand and there wasn’t any story there. He fell out of love with me, the way most people do with the people they love in their early twenties.

I supposed if I were to write the story a different way it would go like this: we fell in love in the summer, and broke up in the winter.

A complete list of all the short stories i’ve read this year.

The ones I’d recommend are in bold.

1. Prophecy by kanak kapur

2. Plaster by David szalay

3. Between the Shadow and the Soul - Lauren Geoff

4. Revision Daisy Hildyard

5. Peking duck - ling ma

6. Tender by Cherline Bazile

7. His Finest Moment by Tom Bissell

8. The Master Mourner Benjamin Ehrlich

9. Trash Souvankham Thammavongsa

10. Do You Belong to Anybody? Maya Binyam

11. Camp Emeline Taryn Bowe -

12. Treasure Island Alley Da-Li

13. Moon Esther Yi

14. This Isn’t the Actual Sea Corinna Vallianatos

15. The Company of Others Sara Freeman

16. Bebo Jared Jackson

17. My Brother William Danica Li

18. Compromisos Manuel Muñoz

19. Grand Mal Joanna Pearson

20. The Mine Nathan Harris

21. The Muddle Sana Krasikov

22. Supernova Kosiso Ugwueze

23. It Is What It Is Azareen Van der Vliet Oloom

24. The ST. Alwynn Girls at Sea By Sheila Heti

25. A Visit from the Chief By Samanta Schweblin

26. My Friend Pinocchio By David Rabe

27. Five Bridges By Colm Tóibín

28. Keuka Lake By Joseph O’Neill

29. How to eat your own heart, Gina Chung

30. Green Frog, Gina Chung

31. Rabbit Heart, Gina Chung

32. After the Party, Gina Chung,

33. Names for Fireflies, Gina Chung

34. Mantis, Gina Chung

35. Presence, Gina Chung

36. Sound of Water, Gina Chung

37. Attachment Process, Gina Chung

38. The Arrow, Gina Chung

39. Honey and Sun, Gina Chung

40. You’ll never know how much I loved you, Gina Chung

41. The fruits of sin, Gina Chung

42. The love song of the Mexican free-tailed bat, Gina Chung

43. Reverons dolls Sara Majka

44. Miniatures Sara Majka

45. Boy with finch Sara Majka

46. White heart bar Sara Majka

47. Saint Andrew’s hotel Sara Majka

48. Settlers Sara Majka

49. The museum assistant Sara Majka

50. Maureen Sara Majka

51. Nashua Sara Majka

52. Strangers Sara Majka

53. Cities I’ve never lived in Sara Majka

54. Four hills Sara Majka

55. Travelers Sara Majka

56. Boston Sara Majka

57. Lips like sugar Cynthia Gomez